This blog continues to share ideas and hopes to generate discussion on social business, knowledge management, and emerging technologies. It also increasingly covers my home, New Orleans, my painting, and travels.

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April 30, 2012

The debate over the individual perspective vs. that of the broader community is so old it is a cliché to even mention this. It is not a matter of the political left vs. right as there are instances of dominating collectives on both the right and left and instances of extreme individualism on the left and right.

Here is one of my favorite poems in which Joy Kogawa in 1973, I feel, nicely lays out some of the complexity of issues in the broader debate.

To the Lady Who Phoned Chairman Mao

Of course, you understand the thing was mad.

Had you represented the League of Women Voters

Or at least the local PTA in your town,

Something might have been arranged.

As it is, I’m only an interpreter, and not empowered

To include in the current five year plan

A telephone call to Peking

From Assonet, Mass.

When you said that you were trying to prove

To your children, who were listening

On the extension, that they were not

Without power or meaning in the world,

And that the individual person

May speak to the ear of the Chairman,

It would normally have been my duty

(Had you not called collect)

To remind you of the Chairman’s words

On the sterility of the alienated act.

The facelessness of the man without a Party

And the reactionary nature of the attentat.

However, as you hang up,

Not having quite reached to Chairman Mao,

I shake my head and savour

The fragrant sauce on an other wise flat

And unseasoned day.

And I am enough of a descendent of Lao Tse

To think of children’s possible delight

In this adventure you made them –

And of you husband, returning form the garment factory,

Who will say that to phone was gall enough,

But to phone collect was chutzpa.

Later, over the evening tea,

I will wonder if in the Untied States

They have had your phone disconnected.

This is from a collection of Canadian poems, I.S. 15, edited by Ted Whitaker, printed in 1973 by Coach House Press, 401 Huron Street (rear), Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The rest are just as good if you can find a copy.

I could not agree more. He notes that nuance is often critical to providing an accurate opinion and nuance is hard to quantify while concrete examples can offer excellent illustrations. This is the case for both wine (see Parker vs. Piaget above) and people’s performance.

I have also seen the destructive effect of the need for quantification when it pushes managers into comparative rankings. A large firm I know required mangers to rank order the people who worked for them on a project and then again on an annual basis to comparatively rank those who reported to them. There were a limited number of slots at the top so this meant that only one or two could be on the top.

This practice set up a terrible competitive situation, as everyone knew that the success of a teammate meant that they would get a lower ranking. This ranking effected pay and promotion so there was a built-in incentive to undermine the success of your team members. It brought out the worst in some people and saw this happen over and over again. The very people that you were supposed to support were the ones that stood in the way of your pay raise, promotion, or even keeping you job.

Rather than using comparative evaluations it is much better to use normative ones were people are ranked by their accomplishments, and not in comparison to others. Adding incentives for team success would be helpful also.

Dick closes with Einstein’s famous quote, "Not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted counts." This is very relevant to evaluations and I would add to be careful about how you use comparisons to avoid unhealthy competitions.

October 05, 2011

Here is a good contest I just learned about. The 2012 Edison Awards, sponsored by the Nielsen Company, Discovery Communications, and USA Today, will present New Product Awards, The Edison Achievement Award™ and The Edison Green Award™ in 2012. The deadline for nominations for the 2011 Awards is December 2, 2011.

The Edison Awards are celebrating their 25th year. Thomas Edison (1847-1931) was granted 1,093 U.S. patents and pioneered five industries that have transformed our world, including the incandescent electric light and the distribution system for electrical power, the phonograph and recorded sound, the telephone transmitter, the electrical storage battery, and the motion-picture camera. These awards recognize innovation, achievement and excellence in the development, marketing and launch of new products.

Finalists will be notified via email the week of February 13, 2012 and the Gold, Silver and Bronze winners will be unveiled at the Edison Awards show on April 26, 2012 in New York City. For more information, or to enter an award nomination, visit www.edisonawards.com.

September 06, 2011

Here is a good post-Labor day question. I saw an interesting blog post title on Twitter, Going through the motions: Only a 1/3 of workers are engaged in their jobs. Looking within the post, it reported that a recent study by consulting firm Blessing White found only 33 percent of North American workers engaged in their jobs. It notes that low engagement levels have a proven negative impact on business performance. That would make sense. A study from HR consultancy Towers Watson backs up this assumption. They found that organizations with high employee engagement had a 19 percent increase in operating income versus a 32 percent drop for companies with low levels of engagement.

The post went on to describe how US employees feel under appreciated which might contribute to their lack of engagement. The first Globoforce Workforce Mood Tracker report found that 55 percent felt they were not rewarded according to job performance, indicating a critical disconnect between recognition and performance. Even more concerning was the finding that 66 percent of those same respondents stated their company doesn't have a recognition program that provides awards based on performance or behaviors tied to its core values. What is the matter with their senior management?

To no surprise the vast majority (85 percent) of U.S. workers surveyed like to have their efforts at work recognized. I wonder about the other 15% and would not like them on my team at work.

I have seen many dysfunctional HR policies in my tenure as an employee with various firms. This lack of awards based on performance falls into that category. However, even with such rewards you have to be careful how they are implemented. When performance rewards are handed out by forcing the ranking of employees, this likely only generates competition between employees and a lot of further dysfunctional behavior. I have seen this in action in more than one firm.

Now I have multiple jobs at the same time and I am lucky to feel engaged with each one. I wonder if there is a connection? This would an interesting study.

April 21, 2009

Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary) was born on April 21, 1926 at 17 Bruton Street, London. Her birthday is officially celebrated in Britain on the 3rd Saturday of June each year.

I was born on the same day twenty years later in Stillwater, Oklahoma. My birthday is officially celebrated on my actual birthday. My father returned from World War Two in the Pacific and married my mother on St. Patrick's Day in 1945 a few days later. They had met while working in an Army office before he was sent to the Pacific.

He first went on commando raids behind enemy lines as part of the pre-invasion planning in New Guinea. He came ashore by way of a PT boat at night. At one point he wrote his family how he had been behind enemy lines without a gun. After the invasion he checked on the morale of troops on the front lines in New Guinea, moving from fox hole to fox hole. Later, he spent time in the bars and other recreation places in Sydney Australia reporting on the morale of the soldiers on leave. During this time he sometimes posed as a war correspondent. He sent a picture of himself in an officer’s war correspondent uniform, thinking his family would recognize this was not his normal uniform since he could not directly say what his role was for security reasons. A family friend living in their town, Greenville, SC, who had been in a similar role, told the family what he was doing.

When my parents married my father was still in the Army, now a Staff Sergeant, and my mother was a civilian employee of the Army. They lived in St. Louis while he continued his duty in Army Intelligence and attended many St. Louis Browns baseball games. After discharge from the Army, my parents briefly went to my mother's home town, Stillwater OK. Her father was a country doctor in Oklahoma before it was a state and she was raised on the family farm. My grandmother ran the farm to support the family as my grandfather made very little money as a doctor since his patients did not have much money to pay him. He was often paid with farm products.

I was born in the same hospital as my mother. They then returned to Austin, TX so my father could finish his doctoral work, interrupted by the war. In 1950 we went New Orleans where he got his first teaching job at Tulane and I was raised to great food and music.

April 07, 2009

Many of you may have read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe. A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally. We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture.

We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So,
here's your chance. Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you.

I am a long subscriber to the Globe and rely on it despite all the online news outlets I also use. I have saved my front page Globe stories of great Boston sports events and consider the Globe as the official report on such efforts. The same goes for other big news items. Thanks to Paul Levy, who organized this blog rally to gather support and ideas on how to save the Globe. Thanks also to Jessica Lipnack who told me about this effort.

March 07, 2009

My friend Ken Cohn recently posted about the troubles he is having with his health insurance provider (see Uncollaborative Insurance). I wanted to share his thoughts as I agree with them completely. Ken is paying an amazingly large amount of money for his health insurance as an individual yet his coverage is limited and the health insurance company refuses to look at his individual situation. I have found health insurance companies to be very unresponsive over the years. I have had frequent struggles over coverage were bureaucratic rules got in the way of common sense.

In one instance a family member required service from someone who knew the history of the patient. That was a critical nature of the service. However, the insurance company would not allow for coverage because the right doctor with the right experience was not one of their doctors. So they said we would have to go to a brand new doctor on their list because that was what the rules said. It would have been a waste of time to do this because the service required a prior base line understanding. The insurance company never seemed to understand this despite letters from our primary doctor. So we never got the service.

In another case I was placed into a potentially critical situation because my doctor did not want to perform an expensive diagnostic procedure that would have uncovered this condition before it advanced to the more critical condition. I could go on and on. We have one of the most expensive health care systems in the world but we do not get the value out of it. Part of the high cost goes to the large profits the insurance companies take out of the system, as well as the unnecessary bureaucracy. I understand the need to spread risk but the insurance companies have too much power over our health care. I do not know anyone who has good things to say about their health insurance provider when they need to talk with them. I wish Ken luck in his struggles.

January 09, 2009

I get these emails from ADP from time to time. I find them interesting so I do not object. I was especially struck with the last one. According to ADP’s Small Business Report small-size businesses (50 employees are less) lost 281,000 jobs in December, the largest decline in small-size business employment recorded by the ADP Small Business Report since the beginning of the ADP National Employment Report dataset in December 2000.

The ADP Small Business Report is a subset of the ADP National Employment Report:

Total small business employment: -281,000

Goods-producing sector: -80,000 small business jobs

Service-providing sector: -201,000 small business jobs

The Report's data is taken from a sample of 400,000 payrolls, covering 24 million employees in all major private industries and regions. Of course they do this as a service to help sell their payroll solutions, nothing wrong with that.

My payroll is pretty simple and only requires a pen and my checkbook. The largest member of my payroll, after me, is the federal government, followed by the state government. Sometimes, I think I am falling behind my other “employees” in wages. Now if the paychecks I write go to help other Americans get jobs, especially to reverse the numbers in the small business sector, I will feel much better about these other two employees I have, especially since I cannot fire them. I am not being partisan in my politics here as I hope that both parties find the wisdom to put my paychecks toward generating real work.

March 12, 2008

This trend combines two of the most boring things around, PowerPoint and Karaoke so maybe it would be funny. Now I cannot sing at all but I can do PowerPoint from my large firm consulting days. Fortunately you do not have to sing or even create new PowerPoint. As the Boston Globe writes, a contestant, “launches into a completely impromptu talk from a PowerPoint slide deck she has never seen before. The results are openly, gleefully absurd.” The Globe goes into says, “The phenomenon has been spreading geek to geek and conference to conference since it was invented by a German artists' group in 2005. PowerPoint Karaoke sessions have been held at last year's E-Tech conference in San Diego, the Chaos Conference in Berlin, and at smaller tech gatherings in Los Angeles, London, and Montreal. In a typical event, a few brave people volunteer to "present" a random deck of slides pulled off the Web, or borrowed from friends or employers.”

The Globe also links to a PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg address to show how PowerPoint can make even the most inspiring talk dull. Now can extract revenge on PowerPoint by making fun of the slides. It is up to your creativity on how effective and entertaining this revenge is. I think it would be fun to give it a try and you do not have to sing. The Globe said that in traditional Karoake, the singers are compared to the professional who first did the songs. With PowerPoint Karaoke, you can only go up over the original. Thanks to the IF team for pointing this put.

December 25, 2007

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. A few years ago you could not celebrate Christmas if you lived in Boston, as I do now. I know something about this but was reminded in a post from Neatorma, Banned in Boston. It said:

“In 1659, just a few decades after they had arrived in the New World, the Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas (as well as gambling and congregation for non-religious purposes). The holiday reminded them of Old World customs from England (the nation from which they’d fled to escape religious persecution). In fact, they refused to consider December 25th a holy day at all - the Catholic Church had selected the date as the day to celebrate Christ’s birthday because it coincided with an ancient, popular pagan festival. Anybody in Boston caught singing, drinking, playing games, or having a feast on Christmas was fined five shillings. The bans were later revoked, but it wouldn’t be the last time a moral outcry deprived Bostonians of diversions that seem relatively harmless today.”

There is a lot more on other things banned in Boston so check out the complete post and seasons greetings.

October 22, 2007

My friends Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps of Netage have written an interesting paper, The Stadium Parable - Mapping the Whole Organization. As Jessica wrote on her blog, Endless Knots, “We wondered what would happen if you could "see" the whole organization at once: who works for whom, who reports "dotted-line," who belongs to what team, how the workflow itself progresses.”

So they wrote the Stadium Parable where you, mythical CEO, invite your whole organization to a stadium to conduct an exercise whereby everyone draws all the lines of work connections. It plays out in interesting ways. Going way beyond the normal organizational chart, you can see some of the many ways that connections occur within an enterprise.

They conclude with some of the many insights that can be obtained from looking at the whole organization and its connections. These include discovering more direct communication paths, finding the highly connected managers and those with the largest organizations, and uneven work loads. If you want to learn more about your organization try putting it in a stadium with their guide, at least do it virtually.

August 02, 2007

This post goes back to an older medium than the web but one that is still more powerful. The NYT recently had a story, Amid War, Passion for TV Chefs, Soaps and Idols, that reported on the introduction of television into Afghanistan. Television was banned under the Taliban. Now 19% of households have TVs so far. This compares with 43 percent of all households with nonleaking windows and roofs, 31 percent have safe drinking water, 14 percent have access to public electricity, and 7 percent have sanitary toilets. The Times reported that “Afghans (are) now engrossed, for better or worse, in much of the same escapist fare that seduces the rest of the world: soap operas that pit the unbearably conniving against the implausibly virtuous, chefs preparing meals that most people would never eat in kitchens they could never afford, talk show hosts wheedling secrets from those too shameless to keep their troubles to themselves.”

South Africa also has wide spread interest in television. However, instead of using soap operas to teach dysfunctional family behavior, this country uses some of its soap operas in a similar way to Sesame Street but for adult education on issues likes AIDS awareness, acceptance of cultural diversity, and the opportunity for all ethnic groups to succeed. While this use of TV could be abused for government propaganda, it is also a great vehicle to communicate positive values. It can be entertaining at the same time to attract and hold an audience. The soaps in South Africa, like Generations, tell engaging stories and they are very popular. Generations is the most watched show on South African television. It and other shows like Isidingo and Soul City are also used as a starting point for dialogue about national issues.

There is great potential here that should be realized elsewhere. I learned about South Africa’s progressive approach to media through research my daughter Sarah Ives is doing. Here is the prelude to one of her papers, Popular Culture as a Medium for Nation-building and Education: Soap Operas in South Africa.

“The bump, bump, bump, of a radio’s drum beat echoes down the narrow road that separates tightly packed homes in Mamelodi, a township on the outskirts of Pretoria. Children’s voices call out in a jumble of Sesotho, Zulu, and English. Women talk with each other as they bring the day’s laundry down from clotheslines. The township is alive with noise. Inside one of the small homes, a woman prepares pap and chicken in rich tomato gravy. She glances at the clock located next to the calendar that depicts black, white, and Indian children holding hands. The caption on the calendar reads: “South Africa Unites to Fight AIDS!” It’s almost seven o’clock. “Katleho,” she calls, “come inside. Generations is about to start!” Katleho, her son, rushes in from the street. The radio turns off, the children and women fall silent, cars pass by less frequently, and the township sits down to watch their favorite soap opera.”

July 03, 2007

One of my first assignments when I shifted from academia to consulting was to serve in 1982 as the project manager for the development of Apple’s national accounts sales training programs. They were attempting to sell Apple 2s and 3s into the corporate market. I still have some of the materials we developed. Next, I got to look at Lisa a few months before it hit the market to do some of the sales training for its launch. I had never seen an interface like it and felt I was seeing the future. After working with some of the BUNCH (IBM’s competitors of the time) this stuff was innovation. At the time there was also an inverse relationship with the formality of an employee’s attire and their role in the company.

Apple has continued to reinvent itself. I am now an iTunes addict. It has transformed how I play music. Here is a nice article from the Economist that looks at the growth and success of Apple. Thanks to the IF team for pointing this out. The article lists at least four important wider lessons to teach other companies.

Not invented here, and very welcome - The first lesson is that innovation can come from without as well as within. Many of Apple’s breakthroughs came from other R&D efforts.

Look at the needs of the user - Apple has designed new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Apple has consistently combined clever technology with simplicity and ease of use.

Stay hungry, stay foolish - Listening to customers is generally a good idea, but it is not the whole story. For all the talk of “user-centric innovation” and allowing feedback from customers to dictate new product designs, a third lesson from Apple is that smart companies should sometimes ignore what the market says it wants today since that limits your options.

Fail Wisely- The Macintosh was born from the wreckage of the Lisa flopped. Now the iPhone is a response to the failure of Apple's original music phone. Will it be like the Mac? I was not one of those to line up to get my iPhone. I hardly use my mobile now but they got a lot of people going with their status thing.

May 07, 2007

Jim McGee had a great post on the Fast Forward blog, Balancing diligence and laziness. He begins with a reference to the work of General Erich Von Manstein (1887-1973) on the German Officer Corps. Erich mapped a 2 x 2 matrix with laziness/diligence on one side and smart/stupid on the other. He said the stupid lazy people can be ignored as they do no harm. It is the stupid diligent people that are the biggest threat to the organization. The smart diligent people become middle management and the smart lazy people become senior management. Jim adds to this, “…our Puritan/Calvinist heritage still dominates reward and evaluation systems. Regardless of the actual importance of thought and reflection to long-term organizational success, you are better off looking busy than looking like you are thinking.”

I have seen this happen in so many organizations. Where middle management that aspires to senior management will watch when the senior guys get to work and make sure they are there earlier to be seen looking busy. There was even one consulting firm that I partnered with that took this to an extreme. I will not name them but it was not one of my employers, only a partner. They saw that their goal was to instill a workaholic nature in their client’s employees. They would spend long hours doing planning sessions. They would be sure to arrive before the employees and leave afterwards. Often they dragged in the employees to their endless planning sessions.

Eventually, when they did not produce much besides detailed analysis and plans, their numbers would diminish and then they would get kicked out. The employees would be glad to see them go. They made us look good since the firm I was with at the time focused on having a good time, working as short hours as possible, but producing tangible results. That has been my work ethic.

Jim posed some useful questions at the end of his post.

What alternate terms than diligence and laziness could we use to better frame the issue?

How important is it to carve out times and places to engage in visible laziness within organizations?

Is this a problem that needs to be solved at the organizational level? For which types of organization?

What barriers to innovation, if any, does a bias toward diligence create?

"The new model emphasizes the distribution, rather than the concentration, of assets-people, information, authority, technology and so on. Economic value is now understood as distributed in the unmet needs of each individual: It is lodged in their hearts and minds, living rooms and kitchens. Value is "realized" in relationships of advocacy and trust. It's no longer adequate to think that value can be "created" inside factories or offices.

History teaches us that those enterprises that move decisively to reconnect with an alienated population get rich first. When wealth creation depends upon authentic relationships of trust and advocacy, there's no more room for adversarial behavior that ekes out a profit at the expense of consumers, employees or suppliers. In a support network, all behavior is aligned with the interests of the individual who pays. More alignment means more cash, more profit and more well-being distributed throughout the network."

April 13, 2007

Here is a great visualization on what might happen next. It was produced by Ross Dawson last December. He based it on the famous London tube map by Harry Beck. The map shows key trends in each sector and also the intersections of these trends. You can download your own map from Ross’s blog. I thank the IF team for this link.

March 30, 2007

Here is a nice tool, the Big Picture, to visualize the relationship between stories, see relates stories, and discover more on the topics and companies featured in the story. It is not nearly as robust as a social network based search tool like iQuest, but it does offer a simple way to go beyond story than is more comprehensive than a simple list of related stories.

You will see the original story in the center of the diagram, and then related stories, companies and topics. You can simply the diagram by dropping any of the three groupings ((related stories. topics, companies). Size does matter as the more popular stories are larger in the diagram. It appears to be manual effort to populate it as “For every story published, News.com editors and reporters included relevant links to other News.com stories. In addition, News.com highlights the important companies that appear in a story as well as attach appropriate topics to each story.” Automate generation would make it easier and open up many more possibilities.

March 18, 2007

My daughter, Sarah Ives, contributed to the recent issue of Sierra Magazine and I wanted to share some of her work. Perhaps this is a bit off topic for this blog but when your daughter is the writer then anything is on topic. I also believe in the work of the Sierra Club and happy to highlight some of what they write about.

Sarah contributed several short pieces to the March/April Lay of the Land section including one on Prince Charles of the UK. As she wrote, “The heir to the throne will have his Jaguar and Range Rover converted to biodiesel, power his three homes with greener energy sources, and take commercial flights instead of gas-guzzling private jets. (No word yet on whether he will fly coach.) Charles hopes that his efforts will influence business leaders to investigate and address their own personal environmental impacts.”

Now, I do not have a Jaguar, Range Rover, or private jet to convert but the last car I bought was a hybrid Prius. I think the Prius runs on less energy than a biodiesel Jag. And I do fly coach.

Sarah also wrote some pieces in the March/April Sierra Club Bulletin: News for Members. I want to highlight the efforts near my hometown, New Orleans. I am in the middle of a visit there right now, the subject of another post, and they still need all the help they can get. It seems that Katrina cut short a meeting with Sierra Club and a coalition of Louisiana environmental groups to oppose the clearcutting of cypress swamps. These swamps are the very buffer that New Orleans needs to reduce damage from future hurricanes. The groups are taking up their efforts again.

As Sarah wrote, “Scientists warn that the logged (cypress) forests may not regenerate due to changes in the area's hydrology. The coalition (saveourcypress.org) is calling on Wal-Mart and other retailers to stop selling cypress mulch in favor of sustainable alternatives like pine bark.” I will be sure to avoid cypress mulch.

March 04, 2007

Following the recent shut down of MySpace for lack of users, Facebook recently decided to close its virtual doors. Well not actually, this was the story from the future from the editors of Mind Bullets. They write that in the 2021 that the next generation is turned off by their parents’ obsession with digital gadgets and a virtual world. They predict there will be a return to flower power and acoustic guitars. One mother complains about her 13 year son, he never touches his laptop and writes her little paper notes instead of email. This new age group will be called generation Z for zero as they reject anything high tech.

Interesting idea. But there will still be enough aging 00s to keep these digital worlds open. I think their prediction may be a little too soon. I am experimenting with a digg button here in case you want to share this.

January 21, 2007

There was an interesting article from CNN on the announcement of the new Apple iPhone, How Apple kept its iPhone secrets. They used a number of tricks with the outside world such as bogus mockups and kept their employees in check. Here is a quote form the article:

“Pillow talk was a challenge at the other end of the spectrum. Keeping secrets from loved ones is especially hard. Those stresses were amplified by the frantic race over the past half year to get the iPhone ready for launch. As Macworld approached, dinners were missed, kids were not tucked in properly, and family plans were disrupted, especially over the holidays. And for what? "Sorry, that's classified" is not considered a satisfactory answer in many households when Mom or Dad misses the school play or the big wedding anniversary dinner.”

I remember developing part of the dealer training for Lisa, pre-curser to the Mac (but not driect parent), as an outside provider. There was similar stress on the employees. The Apple project manager for the training said that she had only had two days off over the past several months and one of those was Thanksgiving. But she was dedicated to the effort, like current employees appear to be from the stories. I confess that I went home on weekends and spent time with my family. I found an interesting aside in the wikipedia after the Lisa was replaced by the Mac, Apple in 1989, "buried about 2,700 unsold Lisas at a landfill in Logan, Utah and got a tax write-off on the land they rented for it."

The CNN article concluded, “Jobs paused during the keynote to acknowledge the strain and sacrifices that the past months have brought not just for the employees who kept the secrets so well, but also for their families. "We couldn't have done it without you," he said, with obvious sincerity.” I guess it can be exciting to be part of a new venture. I felt some of that excitement in the early 80s with Apple but I am sure it was much more for the actual employees.

January 20, 2007

Moving beyond candy bars to iPods, vending machines are offering another way to get stuff without dealing with a real person when you do not have time to go online. The Atlanta Journal reports that 300 vending machines rolled out to sell iPods are raking in high revenues. One in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that makes $55,000 a month. The AJ says: “The vending machines are user-friendly, providing easy-to-access product information through a video touch screen. And, unlike traditional retailers, they never close... The Hartsfield machines have created a buzz among travelers for dispensing a variety of iPods, but offer about 30 different electronic items, from headphones to rechargers, as well.”

January 11, 2007

Here is a great story on what happens when asynchronous tools become real time. Paul Levy is the CEO of large Boston hospital and he writes the blog, Running a Hospital. Jessica Lipnack pointed me to his post, Blackberry Cold Turkey. Here he describes his liberation for his Blackberry. I agree so much with what he says and wrote about it at theFast Forward blog in some detail but I wanted to repeat his quote here. A good New Years resolution.

Paul writes about the bad effects of having constant access to your email when you are away form your computer, “manners disappear. We sit in meetings and, at best, try to look at our handheld screen without appearing to be distracted from the conversation. You have seen the maneuvers -- a casual glance towards the crotch where fingers are quickly at work -- a sudden excuse to go to the restroom -- a coughing fit so the person can turn away from the table and check the Blackberry. At worst, we just put the device on the conference table in front of our face and divest from the conference. Worse still, relationships disappear. A couple sits side by side at an airport, each reading and writing email on their two machines. A child impatiently waits to talk to a parent while the driver hurriedly answers an email while stopped at a red light.”

December 23, 2006

It may be too late for most holiday shopping but here is a gift that no one will already have. It is an umbrella that forecasts if it might rain so you will not forget it. It is one of the latest products from Ambient Devices. “If the chances of rain are 100% the light in the handle will pulse 100 times per minute. If rain is less likely the pulse rate decreases proportionally.”

I wrote about them a while back, Glanceable Technology: Ambient Devices Opens a New Market. It provides a practical rendition of glanceable technology where physical devices undergo changes based on digital data fed to them through a pervasive low-cost wireless network. I now see that they have come a long way. Here is an idea to watch.

December 21, 2006

I recently read at PFSK about transumers which they define as “People who are in a state of hiatus, consumers who are either at an airport, train station or hotel.” These people are increasingly becoming target for marketers. This is something I have noticed with an increase in ads directed at you when you are filling up your gas tank or waiting in the grocery check out line and can see a video screen. PFSK pointed to a detailed report on transumers that goes more into the psychology of the people in this category, rather than simply the location.

Transumers “are consumers driven by experiences instead of the ‘fixed’, by entertainment, by discovery, by fighting boredom, who increasingly live a transient lifestyle, freeing themselves from the hassles of permanent ownership and possessions. The fixed is replaced by an obsession with the current, an ever-shorter satisfaction span, and a lust to collect as many experiences and stories as possible. In other words; the past is, well, over, and the future is uncertain, so all that remains is the present, living for the 'now'*.

There may be some wisdom here but regardless I think that many of us in transit activities are more likely to welcome a promotional message to fight boredom than when we are engaged in regular activities or simply at home. It will not take too long to look for increased participation of this audience with these messages rather than simply content distribution so we may get pumping gas 2.0 or waiting in the check out line 2.0 after all.

December 20, 2006

John Maloney alerted me to this site as part of a long email list discussion on the issue of patenting methods. I think the practice has been abused where organizations have patented things like knowledge management and training methods that are were developed by many simply because no one had patented them. Then they misuse the patent as a misleading sales tool, and even worse, as a club against competitors with smaller legal budgets. Anyway, here is the site that is both funny and sad that our patent office spends time and honors such things.

As the site says this section is for “Crazy Patents! For the USPTO to issue a patent, the invention must be novel, non-obvious, and "useful." The standard for usefulness is certainly the weakest of the three -- any possible utility, no matter how small, will suffice.”

Here are three examples in their words. There are many more.

Plug for and method of patching a hole in a wall – “Maybe not really crazy, but crazily obvious. This patent shows you how to patch a hole in a wall by cutting out a piece the same size as a pre-formed plug, and then inserting the plug and plastering over it. Isn't that pretty much the way drywall is always patched???”

Method of exercising a cat “In 1993 the USPTO issued this patent for using a laser pointer to exercise a cat (yes, by moving the laser pointer beam around and having the cat chase it). Come on now... Not only is this crazy to patent, but this idea had surely been thought of long before this patent came about. In fact, a bit of research turned up the book "One Hundred and Eighty-Seven Ways to Amuse a Bored Cat" (Ballantine Books; May, 1982) that describes the exact same idea, but using a flashlight. Sorry guys -- the use of a laser pointer for the same thing is obvious.”

User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user's buttocks - United States Patent 6293874 – “An amusement apparatus including a user-operated and controlled apparatus for self-infliction of repetitive blows to the user's buttocks by a plurality of elongated arms bearing flexible extensions that rotate under the user's control.”

November 13, 2006

Microsoft's High-Tech High in Philadelphia is a $63 million project. As CBS News relates, "textbooks and blackboards are out...there aren't even books in the library, everything is done on laptops. Even the lockers are automated - opened with the swipe of a smartcard.” It provides an integrated curriculum without separate classes for topics like math or science.

Paul Vallas, CEO of Philadelphia Schools is quoted as saying, “In those schools where we've introduced technology into the classrooms in such a way, the children are better behaved, the attendance is much better and the children are doing better academically.”

They also report that it is estimated that this high tech school will be cheaper to operate as the book budgets go to laptops. But then what about printing costs?

There is an exit exam of sorts — in order to graduate, they have to apply to college. This is certainly better than the MCAS that our state requires.

November 12, 2006

In New World Notes, Wagner James Au reports about the virtual world in Second Life. A recent story covered former Governor Mark Wagner’s visit. Perhaps to drum up support for a political office. Chris Anderson, the Long Tail author, also came for an interview. I still think there is enough going on in the real world to venture here but it is interesting to see that many choose the other world.

November 08, 2006

There is a very interesting open survey on the characteristics of the mobile worker. The password is The complete results are instantly available to you when you complete the survey instrument. It takes about 10 minutes. Note: the survey summary is anonymous and does not include answers to open-ended questions. Some of the results were interesting. This survey is open and under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Thanks to John Maloney for pointing this out.

People are more producitve at home and in the morning. No surprise to me here.

October 29, 2006

Now you can put the wikipedia on your iPod. Encyclopodia is a free software project that brings the Wikipedia to the Apple iPod. Encyclopodia can be installed on iPod generations one to four, as well as on iPod Minis and Photo iPods. It does not say what you do about the ever changing content or your ability to contribute. They do ask you to make a donation.

October 26, 2006

Thanks to Dave Snowden for objecting to the Myers Briggs is an email group I monitor and occasionally participate in. His comments encouraged me to participate again. Here is what he said on his blog in a post on the Skeptics Dictionary. Dave has never taken the Myers Briggs because “it has very dubious roots and also that it attempts to put people into little boxes.” I agree completely and have also never taken it. I took up related issues in a post from long ago, Talking About Wine (& Complexity) – The New Yorker.

Dave points to the Skeptics Dictionary that bashes the Myers Briggs. It gives a very detailed critique of the origins and validity of this test based on Carl Jung’s theories. The test is popular with those looking for simplicity. One might say the same thing about Carl Jung who ideas have long pasted out of academic psychology, except as a part of its history. One of the dangers of this quest for simple answers is found in public education today. As I wrote in my post on Robert Parker:

“It is the same simple faith in numbers that has led many states, including mine, Massachusetts, to develop a test as a sole measure of the quality of a student's education. Now the state tax payers' money is spent on testing rather than programs to actually teach stuff and the shrinking local school budgets are forced to be applied to preparation for these tests, to stay competitive for outside funding, rather than using the same time and money to prepare students to be successful in life.”

I recenlty saw that the Massachusetts Education Board wants to raise the required score to graduate which which adversely effect those who most need the high school diploma to suceed in life.

October 19, 2006

“While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities. Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?”

This is a noble goal and a place to watch. Clicking on the link Enterprise Web 2.0 brings you to a project called We Are Smarter Than Me, the book/project’s home is an online community and wiki managed by Shared Insights where business professionals are encouraged to research, discuss and write about the impact of social networks on traditional business functions.

There was a poll on the site - and results so far. It will be interesting to see the results over time.

1. Which of the following business functions are most likely to be replaced by "community"?

In the description, Tom Malone also announced “another wiki called The Handbook of Collective Intelligence which he hopes will become a definitive survey of the field of collective intelligence, summarizing what is known, providing references to sources for further information, and suggesting possibilities for future research.”

Thanks to John Maloney for pointing this out. It will be worth watching and joining.

September 11, 2006

I learned about One Web Day at a Berkman Thursday Blog meeting. It is coming soon now. As the sites says, “The mission of OneWebDay is to create, maintain, advance, and promote a global day to celebrate online life: September 22, 2006.” The site goes on to say:

“OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities. As with Earth Day - an inspiration and model for OneWebDay - it’s up to the celebrants to decide how to celebrate. We encourage all celebrations! Collaboration, connection, creativity, freedom. By the end of the day, the Web should be just a little bit better than it was before, and we’ll be able to see our connection to it more clearly.”

This is a great cause to get involved with if you are an internet addict or even only a user. The internet has certainly changed my life and enabled a new way to stay in touch with friends and family as well as new business model for which I am grateful. There is a bit of irony here that I cannot resist pointing out. Thee US National Parks have seen a significant decrease in visitors in the last few years. They attribute this to tow factors, the rising price of gas and the rise of internet use keeping people inside at home. How wiil Earth Day and other green causes be affected by the “Inner Earth Day.”

September 01, 2006

This seems fairly amazing to me but then I am not a seond life addict nor have I even looked at it. I use the computer to connect with others on real life issues and to gain information but not as recreation like many others. Now a major hotel chain is investing (it must costs something and what about the ad campaign?) in building a chain of hotels in virtual reality. See the post, Aloft In Second Life: Starwood Hotels Builds New Hotel Concept Virtually, for details. I guess I am old fashoin enough to want to taste my food, feel the breeze, and smell the flowers, etc. etc. to check into a virtual hotel. Fortunaely that real life is quite rich so I see no need to go virtually but then I am certainly not critical of those who do. Everyone has their own interests and I am sure many people do not share mine which continue to evolve. Has anyone tried this?

August 15, 2006

Gartner recently identified the technologies it believes will have the greatest impact on businesses over the next 10 years, naming such areas as social-network analysis, collective intelligence, location-aware applications and event-driven architectures. Web 2.0 is a major theme as Gartner joins this bandwagon. They emphasized the rise of user-generated content and web services. I certainly agree with their view here. The technology press has naturally picked up on their report.

Thanks to Valdis Krebs for pointing this Information Week article on the Gartner report. Gartner Names Hot Technologies With Greatest Potential Impact. It said, “Under Web 2.0, social-network analysis and Ajax were rated as "high impact" and reaching maturity in less than two years. Collective intelligence, on the other hand, was rated as potentially transformational to businesses. Social network analysis, as defined by Gartner, is using the information and knowledge gathered from people's personal networks to identify target markets, create project teams and discover unvoiced conclusions.” This is a nice endorsement for the utility of such tools as iQuest.

I also learned from John Maloney about the Silicon.com post on the report results, Why CIOs need to know about Ajax and mashups, This take on Gartner’s report looked at Ajax and mashups, as well as location-aware software and sensor mesh networking. There seems to be a much opportunity for mashups between these technologies (e.g., location aware software and Google Maps) unless that capability is already built in. The Silcon.com article gives some clear definitions. “Ajax (developer techniques for enhancing the responsiveness and usability of web applications) and mash-ups (the joining together, or 'mashing up', of multiple online applications to create a new service).”

Neither article linked to the actual gertner report so you must have to pay for it. Thanks to the articles for giving the non-paying public a glimpse into what they said and the abiity to quote some results.

August 07, 2006

A friend sent me the following. While it is a bit off my normal topics I could not resist starting the week of with these words from Andy Rooney.

“Three Little Words That Work - The three little words are: "Hold On, Please..." Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt. Then when you eventually hear the phone company's "beep-beep-beep" tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset, which has! effici ently completed its task. These three little words will help eliminate telephone soliciting.

Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end? This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone. This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a "real" sales person to call back and get someone at home. What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible This confuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their system. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their system any longer”

You can also place yourself on the do not call lists. I learned recently that cell phone numbers were going to get released to telemarketers who could then call you on your cell phone and you will have to pay for their call. Do you have any tips to share?

Globalisation. ‘Emerging markets, China and India in particular, will take a larger slice of the world economy. Non-OECD markets will account for a higher share of revenue growth between now and 2020 than OECD economies..”

Demographics. “ The favourable demographic profile of the US will help to spur growth; ageing populations in Europe will inhibit it. Industries will target more products and services at ageing populations, from investment advice to low-cost, functional cars.”

Atomisation. “Network technologies and globalisation will enable firms to better use the world as their supply base for talent and materials. Processes, firms, customers and supply chains will fragment as companies expand overseas. As a result, effective collaboration will become more important. The boundaries between different functions, organisations and even industries will blur.”

To me, this supports an increasing importance of collaborative commerce through virtual means. Tools like blogs and wikis will help facitiate this change.

July 12, 2006

I have been meaning to write about this for some time. Steve Lohr and Saul Hansell provide a nice piece in the New York Times how Microsoft and Google (are) Set to Wage Arms Race for the deaktop. The stakes are nicely summarized in this quote form their work.

“But Microsoft fears that Google could become a kind of operating system of the Internet in the same way that Windows is the dominant operating system of personal computing. For its part, Google wants to avoid becoming the "next Netscape," a reference to the early leader in the browser market that Microsoft eventually thwarted.”

Many of the Google people are veterans of other wars with Microsoft. Both sides have deep pockets and both are scaling up their capital spending. But Microsoft has $35 billion in cash, while Google has about $8 billion. Both have more than me.

Steve Lohr followed the first piece with an article on how Microsoft and Google Grapple for Supremacy. He discusses this war as the corproat ebattle of the century and provides cntext on past battles. Can both win here? I think that Google, being the first stop on the internet for many, will be hurt much more than Microsoft by the loss of net neutraility. However, we will all be losers here, even Microsoft.

June 30, 2006

Now here is a new term that I recenlty learned about from John Maloney. As the wikipedia offers (on June 4):

“Crowdsourcing is a term coined by Wired Magazine writer Jeff Howe and editor Mark Robinson. Whereas with outsourcing, jobs are sent overseas to take advantage of cheap labor in markets such as India or China, crowdsourcing relies upon unpaid or low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”

The wikipedia provies a lot more and the article mentioned that the wikipedia is of course one of the largets crowd sourcing projects. But companis like Proctor and Gamble suppliment their paid R&D staff by offering cash rewards to those outdside th firm who solve busines spronblems for them. The Open Source sofware movement is a variation on this theme. Huck Finn had a similar concept for fence painting.

“Value networks (value webs), are the human and technical resources that work together to form relationships and add value to a product or service. Included in a company’s value network are research, development, design, production, marketing, sales, and distribution. These components work interchangeably to add to the overall worth of a product or service. Value is created from the relationship between the company, its customers, intermediaries, complementors and suppliers…”

There is a lot more in the wikipedia article and even more at the Open Value Networks Resource, a site for people who are helping to bring forward the best work around value networks. People can submit articles, case studies and links for inclusion. It is an excellent resource and offers documents, presentations, downloadable open applications and other tools, videos and more - about value network analysis and complementary approaches.

I heard from Verna that the interest in this topic in healthcare, aerospace and defense, economic development agencies and technology companies is growing. This growth is, in part, fueled by the fact that it has been picked up by the Lean and Six Sigma people as a "next generation" tool that reveals systemic "big breakthroughs" before moving to process work.

It reminds me of some of the analysis of value flows and kowledge flows that we did on the Cigna P&C knowledge management work that was very useful at the time. There we were also looking to align knowledge applications to key business goals and processes. Check out the Open Value Networks if you are doing strategc planning.

June 16, 2006

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the early days of Lotus Quickplace and provided how it is positioned now. As I said then I was a big fan of Quickplace in 2000 and implemented it with several clients including Ryder. Here are some success stories that I received from Liz McKay Beckhardt. Lotus Product Manager from 1997 to 2001.

1. Major Automotive Manufacturer
QuickPlace was deployed to over 20,000 internal users, and a QuickPlace extranet was available for collaboration with another 15-20,000 partners, suppliers and customers. In addition to this fairly typical use, the CEO and executive team have their own QuickPlace server with a highly customized QuickPlace application that leverages Ajax, JavaScript, Java, and various other technologies. In this company, there is a monthly strategy meeting of the top 40 executives -- somewhere in the world. At these meetings, executives evaluate proposals for major changes and initiatives -- for instance, opening new plants, entering new markets, or making workforce changes. Each executive, from the CEO to division presidents to executive vice presidents, is responsible for evaluating each proposal every month in the days before the meeting, making comments, and casting their "vote" - indicating that the proposal is okay as is, needs clarification, or that they see problems.

QuickPlace’s integration with Microsoft Office was for years a perfect way to share these proposals. With some customization, however, became even better. Executives could launch presentations and comment on each slide individually before voting. At the end of the voting period, the CEO had a single page to review with comments on each proposal, pointing him specifically to the page of the proposal where the questions or comments apply. This change, enabled by QuickPlace and some innovative development, made the strategy meetings more productive. The application enhanced security for HR issues, and a dynamic agenda builder for the actual meeting planning.

2. Major US-Based Insurance Company
QuickPlace was used for a specific purpose at this company - collaborative training. Launched in 2000, the QuickPlace service was (and still is) deeply integrated with IBM Lotus Sametime. There are three major integration points between the product - awareness, a chat facility, and Sametime meeting scheduling. In addition to this, the company commissioned customization to show place-specific awareness directly on every page. This way, users know who is "with them" working in the place at the time they are. This feature has been extremely helpful for the internal training efforts of the company. On the extranet, QuickPlace and Sametime were used for training agents in the use of the company's claims software - QuickPlace for reference materials and Sametime for screen-sharing meetings.

3. International Finance and Insurance Company
QuickPlace was deployed to 20,000 users inside and outside this company - again a typical deployment, but this time with a twist. For the extranet, QuickPlace was surfaced via WebSphere Portal to the company's top 1,000 customers - each of them major companies themselves. It was absolutely critical that the place conform to the company's UI standards, so deep UI customization was accomplished to make the experience completely seamless. In addition, the company has added four new "standard" forms to QuickPlace, and integrated them so they appear to be part of the core product. The new forms add even more productivity to the deployment - users can import Acrobat PDFs or Flash presentations, create pages of content that "remind their owners" when they need review, and can assign tasks to multiple individuals, with each assignee given the ability to indicate when "their part is done". The application was so successful that the company converted hundreds of their clients from a 90s-era Microsoft SQL Server / ASP extranet application to the global QuickPlace application. In this case, thinking “out of the box” led the development team to build some components of the QuickPlace applications as separate databases, creating a new set of best practices for large deployments.

All these cases demonstrate the power of collaboration and the promise of web based tools to enable this collaboration. These success stories are representative of key projects undertaken by SNAPPS, an IBM Business Partner and the official IBM Design Partner for QuickPlace. SNAPPS focuses on making its global customers more profitable and productive with advanced collaboration tools from IBM. The SNAPPS team has been speaking on QuickPlace for six years at IBM and Lotus conferences, co-wrote the certification exam for QuickPlace and both IBM Redbooks on the product. Rob Novak, the president of SNAPPS maintains a blog, Lotus Rock Star, that covers mcuh on this topic.

June 15, 2006

I was a big fan of Lotus Quickplace when it first came out and promoted it with a number of clients. In 2000 I worked on the implementation of a knowledge management system at Ryder that used Quickplace as an important component that was novel for the time. This implementation won a CIO 100 award for innovation in 2002 and was written about in many publications such this article, Intelligence in Motion that appeared in Knowledge Management Magazine. Quickplace foreshadowed some of the current uses of blogs for similar purposes as a quick and easy way to set up web-based team workplace.

I recently heard Liz McKay Beckhardt speak on the early days of Quickplace at a KM Forum session on collaboration. Liz was the Product Manager for Quickplace from 1997 to 2001. We engaged in several follow-on conversations, which I greatly appreciate.

One of the first target audiences for Quickplace was internet service providers. Quickplace was seen as an easy-to-set-up home space for their subscribers to share pictures and other family information, foreshadowing another use of blogs. After some focus groups it was decided to shift the focus from the consumer to business audience. First called Haiku, Quickplace 1.0 was shipped in 1999 as a component for Domino users. It was also shipped in a standalone mode as quick-to-set-up web space, primarily as a web-based tool for non-Lotus accounts since it did not require Notes. It caught on well and became very successful serving business clients.

The mantra for these early days of Quickplace was “create your own space instantly to do as you want.” Like knowledge management, Quickplace was most successful when used for a specific business task rather than for general collaboration. Quickplace also provided access control to the site. This ability to limit participants was seen as a big benefit. Later when IT people and senior executives wanted to be able to see inside these Quickplaces, initial users were not happy. This is an interesting contrast to the openness of web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis but this request was seen as going back on one of the original benefits. People then felt they were going to be spied on.

I went to the IBM site recently to see what they say about Quickplace now. For a while the name was changed to Lotus IBM Team Work Place but the name has gone back to Quickplace. The site says, “IBM Lotus QuickPlace is a business-ready, self-service work space expressly designed for team collaboration. With Lotus QuickPlace, users can instantly create secure work spaces on the Web, providing them with a "Place" to coordinate, collaborate and communicate on any project or ad hoc initiative. Key capabilities include:

This seems to be about the same positioning as when Quickplace first appeared. They now say that 12 million team members use Quickplace. That is fairly impressive. Tomorrow I will share some of the early success stories.

June 04, 2006

It is the weekend to think about going up to the mountians. I received a copy of the Great Smoky Mountains Association Newsletter because I bought something from them in my last trip to the area. The site has the mission is to "…support the perpetual preservation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the national park system by promoting greater public understanding and appreciation through education, interpretation, and research." This was a welcom epiece of mail as it describes a great place to visit. The email notice brought make good memories of my first trip there last summer. Here are my comments on local places to eat, Butts on the Creek BBQ – Maggie Valley, NC. If you go be sure to visit this site, North Carolina Pulled Pork Barbecue Joints – Lexington Collection, which offers what seem to be independent reviews of BBQ joints in North Carolina.

May 15, 2006

This is a big deal for bloggers and everyone who uses the internet. I recenlty went to a Berkman Blog meeting where Colin Rhinesmith to discussed the current issues around net neutrality and access discrimination, and what we as bloggers and net citizens can do. As a recent NY Times editorial, Keeping a Democratic Web, said, “One of the Internet's great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft's home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate. Providers could also block access to sites they do not like.”

The telcoms are spending great sums of money lobbying the US congress to enact laws that would kill net neutraility and with it the internet as we know it. If you live in the US contact your local representaives and urge them to preserve net neutraility. If you live outside the US try to make sure your country doesn't do something like this. Here are some more sites on the issue that Colin provided:

May 10, 2006

I get emails from MindBullets: News from the Future every Thursday. They are fictional news items that pedict possible future trends. I really liked the one I recently got on “The New Call Center Revolution, dated June 12, 2007.” This article says that customers do not want to talk to machines anymore. So in this future time cell phone companies are offering the ability to automatically bypass the automated prompts to get to a real person. The moment you dial a call center the phone automatically generates the prompts to get to the real person. I can see a technology war starting here as the call center people try to head this off and the cell phone trying to combat their defences.

I am frequently frustrated talking to machines. At one company I otherwise like, their robot could not understand my pronounciation of their product. The robot eventually got frustrated and hung up on me. I also almost always have a question that does not fit into the options in their list of possible issues.

There are many companies that try to keep you from ever even reaching their call center. I recently went to the web site of a storage device company I could not find a telephone number on their site. If you search under telephone support you do not get a number. If you go to other options for contacting them, you can find that there is a telephone option but when you try to find the number you only get their policy for telephone support and no number. I managed to find a number only because it was listed next to the charge on my credit card bill. Thank you to the credit card company. I hope this practice is not changed. Once I got through the screening, their real person was actually helpful and did not insist on the service charge they try to collect for telephone support after three months. Score one for people. I have had call center people at other companies insist on a credit card before they answer the simplist question about their product, sometimes asking for almost as much as the product cost.

A large part of the problem comes from the trend toward out sourcing call centers, The usual arrangement is to pay the outsourcer for each call taken so the goal is to not have anyone call you which seems counter to normal customer relations. The automated voice response systems (a.k.a the robots) are designed to wear down the caller so they give up without actually telling them to go away. This is especially the case for technical support for products you have alreayd paid them for. I guess the short sighted vision is not geared for customer endearment to get more sales. It has been my expereince that most of the real people who work in the call centers (for support, not sales) actually do want to help you. They bear the burden of the customer fatigue or anger or frustration after the customer has beem "soften up" by the robots. I have done a lot of knowledge management work within call centers but it was always work designed to make the people provide better service, not to further outsource aspects of their job to robots.

Another future feature in the Mind Bullets article was the ability to detect and automatically redirect automated incoming sales calls to a number where a barrage of abuse is directed into the phone. Another tech war in the making.

May 09, 2006

The Harvard Business School newsletter, Working Knowledge, recently published an interview. Lessons from the Browser Wars, with Harvard Business School professor Pai-Ling Yin, who co-authored a paper, "Economic and Technical Drivers of Technology Choice: Browsers." She and Timothy F. Bresnahan looked at the importance of technical progress versus economic forces in the diffusion of technologies by looking at what happen with web browsers. They found that the critical economic force was browser distribution with a complementary technology, personal computers (PCs). The essence of their thesis was econimic “distribution had a larger effect on the rate and direction of technical change than technical browser improvements…Widespread use of the Internet spurred rapid expansion of the PC market in the late 1990s.” They felt Microsoft won over Netscape because it captured all the new users entering the market.

Now they feel it is too late for new browsers such as Firefox because there is not a massive new user base and these new browsers will have the problem of convincing people to switch browsers rather than simply picking which brower should be their first one as Microsoft did when it won over Netscape.

Now these Harvard people are pretty smart to figure all this out. However, they also might be protected by their institutions from the problems facing many ordinary Internet users. When I faced the recurring problems of viruses, spyware and adware, the first thing the PC repair person told me to do was switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox as it is much better at controlling these problems. Firefox was free, easy to install, and so far has not kept out of any Internet activity I want to engage in. I also use Safari on my new Mac, The Mac was another switch I made in the face of the spyware, et al problem. The authors also mentioned Camino for the Mac which I have not used

The authors do say that Firefox only has a small percentage of the user base and these are mostly tech savvy users. Now I am not tech savvy – remember I got 6 out of 100 on the geek test. But I do listen to people who I think are tech savvy like my friend Peter Gloor who endorsed the PC repair person’s advice.

I also see people at meetings who I think are tech savvy using Firefox, not to mention many of the IBMers I see. Firefox seems to have a bit of a cult following, like Amazon did once long ago. But, and this seems big to me, it also addresses one of the major problems that non-institutional users face who do not have the protection of corporate firewalls, - spyware, adware, and viruses. I think the HBS people are overlooking this issue. They did say that if Microsoft feels that the security issues are getting too large, they could throw some of their big stash of money at solving the problem. It may be tto late then.

I should say that I have nothing against Microsoft and I continue to use many of their products. I also think that Sharepoint has gotten much better and plan to learn more about it, However, I think they may be missing something here.

April 24, 2006

Who owns the Internet? In the article, Who owns the Internet? We have a map that shows you, by Ben Worthem, CIO Magazine supplies a map of who owns the routers and the distribution core. Worthem concludes, ‘For starters, while AT&T and Verizon are clearly the two biggest owners at the core (they dwarf Qwest, the other remaining baby bell), they don’t own anywhere near enough for us to be worried about a monopoly. Also, the cable companies really own very little of the core, which isn’t much of a surprise since they are primarily focused on the last mile. Nonetheless, it is startling to see.”

He goes on to add: “The map focuses on the backbone, i.e. where a packet goes after it passes through the last mile and into the core of the Internet. The question I was hoping it would answer was if one or two companies owned enough of the backbone as to give it or them too much control over the heart of the Internet. My feeling is that while AT&T and Verizon own an awful lot, they don't own enough to monopolize the core.” This is covering the distribution of the intenret and not the content. But it does indicate who controls access to this content. Thanks to Valdis Krebs for sharing this article and map.

But what about net neutraility and the counter move to let the telecoms have more control over what they carry. Ben Worthem also writes a blog, Net Effect, and he gives a good explanation of the issue of net neutrality in his blog. For those that are not familiar with it, the net neutraility issue is over the principle that all traffic that travels over the Internet should be treated the same regardless of the recipient, sender or the type of information it is. The online content providers are in favor of it and feel it has been de facto law for some time. The telcoms want to treat diffetent types of data differenlty to make more money since they invested a lot in it. Others feel the telcoms will use this approach to block competitors like Vontage. I am not an expert on this issue but I would agree with those who argue for net neutrality to keep the Internet open. The is looming fight in the US Congress over this.

Here are a few highlights from what Irving wrote…”the rise of social networks, enabled by the Internet and related tools and platforms which are making it possible for people to connect and work together in unprecedented ways within and outside the boundaries of organizations and countries. GIO participants observed that increasingly the organizing principle for work is no longer the enterprise but the endeavor and that it may soon be time to redefine what we mean by enterprise, employer and employee, as looser aggregations of collaborators form and disband opportunity by opportunity.”

I recently attended a KM Forum where Bob Wolf talked about the Open Source community around Linux and how it responds quickly to crisis, taking days to fix security issues instead of the months that most software companies might take. This occurs even though most people have day jobs and they do not get paid for their Linux related work. He wrote in more depth about this in the HBR article “Collaboration Rules” but there is no free link to this. I have also seen this in action in response to the Katrina crisis. A few volunteers in Cambridge connected to the Berkman Center set up the Katrina People Finder Project to provide a consolidated single source for people to find their family and friends from the hundreds of ad hoc missing person data bases set up. They accomplished what no government organization had been able to do. They also got over 20,000 volunteers within 24 hours to provide virtual assistance transferring data into the system they set up.

The full IBM report goes into this in more detail. It also said the following about the increasingly connected world. “Harnessing the wealth of Data and information available from increasingly distributed and disparate sources could represent the next huge opportunity for societal and business innovation.” This is the focus of the software tool, iQuest, as I wrote about yesterday. It can show who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations are taking place. More later on this.

The IBM report also talked about the concept of “flipping the equation” or turning business problems on their head. I can see this working many places such as the “pull” rather “push” approach to content distribution allowed by RSS. Another example, is the use of blogs behind the firewall for project management so everyone can see what everyone is doing instead of complaining about silos. A classic one was the switch from training away from the job to providing knowledge management aligned to work processes allowing you to learn on the job at the point you needed it. I am sure there be will be more.

April 05, 2006

I really liked a recent post by Jack Vinson on Reputation everywhere or the growth of web based rating systems. He said that even Quicken, his personal finance system asks for ratings on vendors. He also mentions Epinions that lets individuals rate products they've purchased and links to any online vendors (and ratings of those vendors). Google builds its search on reputation as defined in large part by who links to whom and thus it favors blogs with high traffic and many inward links.

Menupalace covers Toronto restaurants and other venues. It has a forum where people can submit reviews. This is common on many food sites and travel sites. The wisdom of crowds is profilerating. I am sure there are attempts to game this system and when the crowd is small, the results can be more easily gamed or biased by a few. Rotten Tomatoes also you to rate movies. Newsvine allows you to rate news stories.

What’s next? Will the US Internal Revenue System ask us to rate the service providers whose services we deduct? Will the HMO ask for rating of health care providers? They may already. Digital technology makes all this much easier to do. What do you want to rate today?

April 03, 2006

I learned from the RSS email group that this site, First Gov.gov, provides access to government sites with RSS feeds. Topics include agriculture, business, education, health, international relations, and science. Also includes a link for downloading RSS readers. As the email said, RSS has several meanings: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, and RDF Site Summary, where RDF stands for Resource Data Framework. In any case, it's a method of summarizing the latest news and information from a website, that can be easily read by many news readers or news aggregators.